The Brunch Table

It’s been linked elsewhere for other purposes, but I find this this 1978 New Yorker profile on Johnny Carson fascinating for reasons besides the subject material. The article is only as old as I am, but it sounds so…old.

It’s not just the odd unfamiliar word (I had to google minatory, “foreshadowing evil,” and causerie, “idle conversation”).

It’s not the somewhat short-sighted cultural commentary:

“This drives yet another nail into the coffin lid, already well hammered down, of Marshall McLuhan’s theory that TV has transformed the world into a global village. (Radio is, as it has long been, the only medium that gives us immediate access to what the rest of the planet is doing and thinking, simply because every country of any size operates a foreign-language service.)”

It’s not even the pre-New-World-Order reference to how baseball fandom “annexed Japan.”

Now that I think about it, it’s really just that the author uses the word “digital” to mean “relating to the fingers.” It took me about thirty full seconds to parse that sentence. You try:

” I note the digital mannerisms (befitting one who began his career as a conjurer) that he uses to hold our attention during his patter. “

See?